Swimmer

The world – as Coach liked to say – was your lobster. You could confirm that all major countries had airports, streets with people and cars, and interchangeable hotels with beds of varying discomfort. And the water was always wet – although some of the pools in Mediterranean countries did have moss or mould growing up the sides. In Spain it was so turbid as to appear bottomless: Coach claimed to have glimpsed the masts and funnels of sunken ships. Your winning grab for the rail nearly broke your wrist: afterwards, measuring the pool, you found it to be twelve centimetres short. ‘Spanish metres must be different,’ said Coach. The water behind the Iron Curtain was always ice-cold, with a rusty taste, as if it had been long-stored in cans. Once, in Prague, something stabbed into your push-off foot on the first turn: pain and shock goaded you into frantic activity. On the third lap you realized that you were swimming back through a rose-pink cloud of your own blood. Desperate, you exploded again, to record your fastest-ever time. When they checked the wall there was no apparent cause: you suspected Coach, who had often speculated about deploying blowpipes or cattle-prods. Doc blinked at the inch-long spine he’d tweezered out of your sole: ‘Medical science confesses itself baffled,’ he said, ‘unless a porcupine was passing by.’ Afterwards, the Czechs presented you with a massive medal of dark wood like a cask-lid, carved with a strange animal – half-bear, half-chicken. ‘It’s a nice place to visit,’ said Coach, as he did about everywhere, ‘but I wouldn’t want to live here.’

In the Europeans you finished fourth, behind two stubbled, steroided East German hulks and a cork-skinned Russian who, pre-race, had been pumped full of oxygen-rich new blood. They snarled at you as if they’d only taken the drugs as a handicap and felt that you were cheating by not cheating. You knew that with an effective testing system you’d have had the gold and, for your subsequent fifth and sixth in the Olympics and World Championships, silver and bronze. ‘You’re just unlucky,’ sighed Coach, ‘in a few years’ time we’ll be able to do it, too.’ Remembering the Russian girl’s face – blank-eyed, drooling – you didn’t feel particularly deprived. At least you’d always done your time, done your time – indeed, you usually improved on it, so that you were regularly defeating yourself. What you really loved was setting records – no, breaking records, smashing them. You had a mental picture of a hovering vinyl round – some music you hated like ‘This Old House’, Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddup You Face’, or Dad’s booming Wagner or Slim’n’Slam 78s – a big black shiny zero that was blotting out the sun … which suddenly exploded into flying shards and grey dust, as if hit by a sniper’s bullet, allowing the light to come flooding through.

At the end of the competitive season the other squad members would fall into heavy, silent depressions, but you were secretly pleased at being able to resume unmediated contact with the water. While they hibernated you embarked on prodigious long-distance swimming programmes. Coach, fearing that you’d lose your edge, was always trying to stop you. ‘You need your speed! Need your speed!’ he kept saying, but to no avail. Fifty miles in twenty-four hours: another disk – the British Endurance record – went smithereening. You were the queen of the Charity Swimathon: most of the Navy had sponsored you at a pound a mile – afterwards they sent a telegram: YOU’VE BANKRUPTED THE FLEET BUT THE FLEET STILL LOVES YOU ANYWAY. They helicoptered you out to an aircraft-carrier for the admiral to present you with a door-sized cardboard cheque. Then the sailors three-cheered you and bore you round in triumph. Even though you felt your swimsuit ride right up at the back, there were no comments or wandering hands – they looked at you without lust, with a sort of bashful reverence. Perhaps all the best men joined the Navy: or was it that the sea’s lulling rhythms had taught them kindness and love? After they’d piped you away you looked back, eyes misting, to see the deck a fluttering mass of white caps, waving.

Coach was at the centre of your world. Despite his sloganizing, sulks and foot-stampings, you all loved him. He knew just when to pressurize and when to slacken off, whether to threaten or cajole. And he was always fun: sometimes you’d slap his spreading pink tonsure, with a sound like a fish hitting a marble slab, and he’d chase you, growling like a bear, flicking at your legs with his blackboard pointer. You knew he was just a big softy by the way he draped his arm around your neck, massaged the stiffness out of your shoulders, gently squeezed your forearm at the end of a really gruelling session. And when you won – or even did your time – he’d hug you so hard that you’d feel you might go right through him and out the other side … and weren’t those tears in his eyes? Dad had strangely stiffened up around your twelfth birthday – no more kisses or sitting on his knee – as if you’d committed some unforgivable crime. On visits home you felt as if you were shrinking, getting colder and colder: Mum’s lap looked as distant and unattainable as Mount Everest. The school doctor had put you on the Pill to regularize your periods for competitions: when Mum found the packet she slapped your face and then, having listened to your tearful explanations, nodded and slapped you again.

In fact, you hardly ever got to see any boys. At meets and championships the only real interaction between Men’s and Women’s teams was a series of practical jokes: your face ached from trying to laugh with everyone else at the apple-pie beds, fire-extinguisher fights or purloined underwear. The male star – your equivalent – was impossibly gangling, ichthycephalic with patchy, lemonish tufts of hair, sandy lashes under thick black brows and eyes that seemed confused and unfocused, like something unborn. Racked by self-consciousness, he hid his raw and acned face, peeling and flaking, behind the ramparts of an upturned batwing collar. At the poolside, stripped, his head would roll into his shoulder like Quasimodo’s, attempting at least to conceal half of his shame. But this was the very thing that you liked about him: the red and gold whorls and rosettes on his grey body made him appear to be in mid-metamorphosis, as if – especially in the patches around his large-areolated nipples and inner thighs – they were forming scales. His name was Tom, the same as the transfigured little sweep in The Water Babies, but you thought of him as The Merman. You knew when he was about to enter the room: a gentle wind seemed to pass across your face. In your dreams you were swimming together, skin to skin, merging. Your eyes never met, you never spoke to each other, but once, at a post-competition disco, your team-mates, sniggering, pushed you together on the dancefloor: ‘Beauty and The Beast’! You danced to one of your favourite records, Steve Arrington’s ‘Feel (So Real)’: Tom’s head was twisting round so far that it almost faced in the wrong direction. You put one hand, then the other on his shoulders – they were ridged, and solid as rock – before you felt the blood from your nose dripping on to your bare feet and you bolted back to your respective groups. You told Mum about him: ‘The shy boys,’ she said, with a glare at Dad, ‘are always the sly boys.’ Coach just put his arms in the teapot position, flared his nostrils like Kenneth Williams and lisped: ‘A little bit that way, I’m afraid, our Thomas.’

On the last day of the Europeans, the night of your sixteenth birthday, you lost what Mum had always called Your Jewel. You’d got properly drunk for the first time, after an evening of party games – Up Jenkyns!, Dumb Crambo, Animal & Stick – spiced with Draconian booze forfeits. Coach helped you to your room, then kissed you, his tongue exploring your teeth and gums like a slow-crawling snail, and you realized with a rancid choke that the characteristic smell on Mum’s breath was the same as his – gin. He began twiddling your nipples, as if trying to fine-tune a radio to a fading signal: as he loosened your clothing and precisely arranged your limbs you wondered if you were moving on to a new section of Buck Dawson’s ‘Dry Land Exercises’. ‘I’ve been waiting eight years for this moment,’ said Coach. You couldn’t recall much of what happened next: he chose to interpret your lapses into unconsciousness as signs of excess ecstasy – likewise, presumably, your vomiting. Next morning he was grumpy and suspicious because you hadn’t bled: you nearly replied that you only did that when you got excited. He insisted on photographing you, naked and shivering, on the Latissimus Machine. It never occurred to you to report him, but you did wonder where the usually eagle-eyed chaperones had been during all this. You didn’t feel particularly different: just slightly heavier in the pool, as if you were shipping a little more water, and for a few days you had a strange sensation of cobwebs brushing your face. When Coach did try again, back at school, it was without much enthusiasm: he seemed almost relieved when you pushed him away – being the first was all he had really cared about.

‘Being first is what matters,’ said Coach. ‘Records will always be broken, but a medal is forever, is history.’ The Commonwealth Games were coming up again: the last remnant of Empire, of colonialism and imperialism – the final redoubt of sportsmanship and fair play. Now that you had a real chance of a silver – maybe even a gold – just doing your time, doing your time was suddenly no longer enough. It was now that Coach called on his full motivational skills: he gave you photographs of your main rivals and made you deface their fresh, smiling faces with felt-penned duelling scars and large Pierrot-style teardrops. At the last practice, an ASA bigwig with a white moustache appeared and gave an interminable speech which ended, ‘It’s the spirit of the thing that counts: it’s not the winning but the taking part.’

‘You heard the nice man,’ said Coach afterwards, ‘it’s not the winning it’s the taking apart … the old fart!’

Back in London for a week you were quite unable to follow Coach’s instructions to taper – to stay out of the water, storing up extra energy for release on the day. ‘You need your speed! Need your speed!’ – but you were as hooked on your weekly 75,000 metres as Mum was on her hourly toper’s visits to the bathroom. During this stay you discovered her bottle of Gordon’s floating inside the toilet cistern. Disguised in an old swim-cap, you sneaked into small pools where no one knew you: being back in the water with normal people again was like swimming through a lunatic asylum. You even tried the Ladies’ Pond at Kenwood, but a short-haired woman smiled at you and called you ‘sister’ so you fled in mortal fear of sapphism. ‘Bad news,’ said Dad, as you came in, ‘Russia and the GDR have just applied to join the Commonwealth.’: your heart sank before you realized he was joking, although he hadn’t smiled.

The Commonwealth Games were always the best one, the most relaxed – being only a Grade B terrorist target. On the first morning, while your team-mates were having fun throwing furniture into the practice pool then fishing it out again, you dodged the chaperones and wandered away from the Games Village. Although London born and bred it was as if you’d never seen a city before: turning left-right-left-right, you cut across the streams of machines and people, through the heat-shimmering air, under a blue-black sky – the welkin! – that seemed to balance on the tops of the tallest buildings like a precarious lid. The hairs in your nose tickled, you felt light-headed with being alone for once – half-lost, free.

Just when you’d begun to feel tired, a small park presented itself. After buying a sandwich and a styrofoam coffee at a stall by the gate you sat down on grass that was thick, clean and dry like grown-out Astroturf. At its centre was the statue of a standing figure, gesturing with an extravagantly-plumed hat, his expression at once awestruck and proprietorial. You didn’t recognize the name but you knew he must have been the man who had discovered this park. It was the best sandwich you’d ever eaten: some sort of diced sausage, hard and salty, with something sourish -– olives? – something sweet – capsicum? – and the distinctive metallic tang of watercress. Its crisp top was studded with unfamiliar seeds and husks. When you opened it up, however, the inside looked so revolting – a viscous smear of colours – that you couldn’t face another mouthful.

The park was full of young office workers on their lunch breaks. They’d formed two large groups, one poring over a newspaper crossword, the other devoted to what appeared to be a glitteringly choreographed mass flirtation. Eyes sparkled and teeth gleamed in their tanned faces: the vivid floral designs on the girls’ dresses were echoed by the men’s ties. There was one boy who wasn’t smiling, who sat slightly apart from the others. He was watching you, his chin resting on his knees: you moved to tug down your skirt hem but then didn’t bother. You lay on your back, then rolled over. Although every flower petal in front of you remained in sharp focus, the whole parterre was shifting in the heat like a kaleidoscope. It was as if, after many years adrift, you’d finally been cast up on a friendly shore. All you wanted was for the Chalkhill Blues to descend, but five thousand miles was too far for them to fly.

Then there was a high, shrill sound: all the workers had linked arms and were marching out of the park, whistling the Seven Dwarves’ Hi-Ho-Hi-Ho song. Dad always called offices ‘Concentration camps of the soul’, but you watched them go as if they were the gods returning to Valhalla over the Rainbow Bridge. The serious boy looked back once. You imagined their destination: an office full of lovers, light-heartedly but seriously doing mysterious but important things with computers – things to do with charity, fashion or the news.

In the last school production you’d played Miranda in The Tempest: now you recalled one of the bits for which you hadn’t needed the prompt:

O wonder

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